Hot and bothered

It’s about time a woman wrote a book about preying on young boys

Traditionally, sexual predators in literature have always been men. The upside of living in a post-feminist world is that women now have equal opportunity to become paedophiles. A fresh, new example is Celeste Price, the protagonist of author Alissa Nutting’s book Tampa, about a high-school teacher with an irrepressible draw to teenage boys. After we’d put the book down, caught our breath and wiped the sweat off our brow, we sent Nutting some questions about sex, feminism and the possibility of Tampa: The Movie.

There’s a taboo where writing about sex is concerned, to the point that some pretty big names in literature will tell you that it should be avoided completely. Was this a concern for you? Was Tampa a kind of mission to show you could write about sex well?

It wasn’t a mission in that sense, though I did feel Tampa had to be off-the-charts hypersexual, for so many reasons. A good deal of this book is examining and raising questions about sexual fantasy, after all. I realize some people immediately dismiss books that contain explicit sexual writing, particularly taboo sexual writing. It marks your book, that’s true. And it removes your book from the general population of literature, relegates it to a special ward for troublemakers. But the book as I wrote it couldn’t have been written any other way – I wasn’t willing to compromise on its smuttiness.

How did you decide to write it in the first-person?

One of the main themes is an examination of external versus internal – the image we put forward versus the person we are inside. Appearance-wise, the main character of the book, Celeste, couldn’t possibly be more appealing. But she’s a terrible (if funny) person. To fully see that, readers needed to get her thoughts as well as her actions. Additionally, it was very important that she have complete agency throughout the story. It’s always her voice we’re hearing; she has full narrative control.

Does feminism come into play at all? It seems like you’re turning many stereotypical situations of older men/younger women on their head. Is Tampa part satire?

Absolutely to both – in western culture we definitely have an inability to see female sexuality towards males as predatory. So Celeste is this penultimate sexual predator, to the point of being quite comical.

The obvious comparison is Nabokov’s Lolita. Did that novel inspire you?

Only in the most general situational sense of a first-person adult sexually preying on an underage victim; certainly not in content – not in form or style or theme. Tampa is specifically about the current phenomenon of female teachers having sex with underage male students and the contemporary cultural views of female sexuality that I see playing a heavy role in this phenomenon.

So now that Lolita’s had two, how would you feel about Tampa the film?

If it were to be at all true to my book, it would certainly push the envelope in all kinds of mind-bending ways. Reading Tampa, there may be times when readers have to remind themselves that the boys Celeste is fantasizing about and pursuing are 14 rather than 18. In the film, that visual reality would be completely inescapable.